Question :
The geocoding webservice does not work with special character like ö or blanks.

Answer :
The parameters for the webservices have to be utf8 url encoded. If you call the webservice with "New York" you have to url encode "New York", otherwise our service will search for "New" and all other parameters afterwards get lost.

"New York" becomes "New%20York" and instead of ö use %C3%B6.

URL Encoding replaces spaces with "+" signs, and unsafe ASCII characters with "%" followed by their hex equivalent. Safe characters are defined in RFC2396. They are the 7-bit ASCII alphanumerics and the mark characters "-_.!~*'()".

Check the documentation of your programming language to see how url encoding is done in your programming language.

Point your browser to CPAN uri_escape_utf8() is available for UTF-8 url encoding in newer versions of URI::Escape.
It's needed (and nice to use) if the Page where the user typed in the search query uses ISO-8859-1.

I was also facing the same problem for url encoding, but its for VC++. I had written a separate function for the same and now its working. But is there any ready made function or procedure with Geo Names which we can directly apply for url encoding which will work for all types of windows applications?

I am getting XML file as a result of "http://ws.geonames.org/search?name=&country=IN&type=xml" .
and in this file, i am getting a city as "Tiruchchirāppalli" . now i want to display this city name as it is, but when i am displaying it, it is shown as "TiruchchirÄppalli" . Is there any solution for this.?

I test for download a xml from my web site, and work, but in the exe when attempt to load the data from geonames - for example: http://ws.geonames.org/search?q=london&maxRows=20 -, not work, in the exe the flash not load the xml from geonames and I not know why...

{"totalResultsCount":1,"geonames":[{"adminCode1":"00","lng":"-5.5","geonameId":2287781,"toponymName":"Republic of Côte d’Ivoire","countryId":"2287781","fcl":"A","population":21058798,"countryCode":"CI","name":"Costa do Marfim","fclName":"country, state, region,...","countryName":"Costa do Marfim","fcodeName":"independent political entity","adminName1":"","lat":"8","fcode":"PCLI"}]}

{"totalResultsCount":1,"geonames":[{"adminCode1":"00","lng":"-5.5","geonameId":2287781,"toponymName":"Republic of Côte d’Ivoire","countryId":"2287781","fcl":"A","population":21058798,"countryCode":"CI","name":"Costa do Marfim","fclName":"country, state, region,...","countryName":"Costa do Marfim","fcodeName":"independent political entity","adminName1":"","lat":"8","fcode":"PCLI"}]}

Is "%20" the correct enconding for white spaces? If so why does name=costa%20marfim return no results?
What search is done when the name is enclosed in double quotes "%22costa%20do%20marfim%22"? Does it search for a exact name?